rockefeller_student_sponsered_speaker_2018fandomcom-20200215-history
Student Sponsored Speakers 2019
Angelika Amon (MIT) - Cancer, Cell Cycle lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Janelle Ayres (Salk Institute for Biological Studies) - Host-pathogen interactions, microbiome. lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness # Dr. Ayres has made paradigm-shifting discoveries in immunology and host-microbe interactions that have re-defined dogma in the field. She is the leading world expert in the area of pathogen tolerance and continues to study the interaction between organismal physiology/metabolism and immunology. She has received many impressive awards to recognize her scientific achievements, including the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists and the NIH Pioneer Award. She is now a full Professor after only 6 years at the Salk Institute. Importantly, she is an inspiring role model, mentor, and advocate for women in STEM. # She's a rising star whose work spans many fields, including host-microbe interactions, neuroscience, immunology and metabolism. Iain Cheeseman (MIT) - Kinetochore Biology / Biochemistry lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Iain is really engaging, creative, and contagiously excited about kinetochore biology. His work is a great intersection of cell biology, proteomics, and biochemistry, and would be relevant and interesting to a lot of people at Rockefeller. He's a really inspirational and fun scientist to talk to about his own and others' work. Richard Daneman (UCSD) - Blood Brain Barrier lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Not many labs dedicated to blood brain barrier and it's both poorly understood and super important when it comes to drugs and disease. This is pretty much THE BBB lab. Catherine Dulac (Harvard University) - Molecular biology of olfactory signaling in mammals lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Excellent work on parenting and social behaviors Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley) - Computational Biology, Open Science lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Started PLoS and is now editor-in-chief of eLife Nels Elde (University of Utah) - Host-pathogen interactions as a model for studying mechanisms of evolution lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Virus evolution and shit Cassandra Extavour (Harvard University) - Evolutionary and developmental genetics lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Dr. Extavour has some really groundbreaking new ideas about how evolutionary biology can shed light on key biological problems like development and aging. Rather than studying a widely conserved system in a single model organism, she compares and contrasts the behavior of that system in a wide variety of species. She started a pioneering collaboration, EDEN, to help other labs utilize nontraditional model organisms for this kind of study. She is a great speaker and has a lot of experience with public outreach, so I think she will give a very entertaining talk. Also, as a gay scientist it is very inspiring to see someone like Dr. Extavour who is not only an extremely successful researcher, but also visibly and proudly a queer woman of color. I think her identity, and the fact that she has lived and worked in four different countries (Canada, Spain, England and the U.S.), mean that she will be able to relate to a lot of the students in our program in a way that many speakers cannot. John Fahy (UCSF) - Asthma Biology / treatment lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Dr. Fahy is the director of UCSF airway research center. He identified asthma biomarker serum Periostin. And he is also the pioneer of airway mucus pathology. Richard A. Flavell (Yale School of Medicine) - Innate and Adaptive immunity, T cell tolerance and activation lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness His lab covers many aspects of immunobiology ranging from adaptive to innate immunity, metabolism to genetic mechanism, disease modeling, humanized mice etc Paul Frankland (U of Toronto) - Neuroscience, fear and forgetting lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Fear conditioning, neurogenesis, and the biology of forgetting. They study how the integration of newborn neurons in the adult hippocampus reduces the salience of pre-existing fear memories through synaptic competition against the preexisting synaptic structure. AKA, how do we forget? Andy Gardner (University of St. Andrews) - Evolutionary Biology lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness He’s an exceptionally clear-thinking evolutionary theorist who’s trying very hard to explain why life is the way it is Hopi Hoekstra (Harvard) - Evolutionary Biology lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Such a great scientist, presenter, nice person! Gilles Laurent (MPI Brain) - Neuroscience lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness have been doing groundbreaking neuroscience for decades, trained a bunch of big name pis, now moving into reptiles and cuttlefish camouflage, inspiring speaker! Harmit Malik (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) - Evolutionary Biology lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Great speaker and good person to have lunch with Benjamin Prud’homme (IBDM: Institute de biologie du development de Marseille) - Developmental Biology lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Prud'homme studies genetic and phenotypic novelty in flies. His group uses cutting edge computational techniques to understand the genetic networks underlying novelty. They are also exploring how/if sexual selection is involved in wing pigment evolution. Finally they are studying the neuronal networks of a pest fruitfly. Something for everyone! :) Steve Ramirez (Boston University) - Neuroscience lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness labeling engram cells allowing memory manipulation by optogenetics Aviv Regev (Broad/MIT) - Genomics lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Puts the Broad's big data to really good use, and her work has spanned computation, biology, and chemistry in a pretty unique way. Bernardo Sabatini (HMS) - Neurobiology lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness The work the lab produces is always a good standard for the field of systems neuro and parallels some of the interests of various HOLs here. Sebastian Seung (Princeton University) - Computational Neuroscience lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness They are changing the way computational neuroscience is being done by crowdsourcing their brain segmentation using a game called EyeWire! Jason Shepherd (University of Utah) - Neurobiology lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Really cool work showing how a protein involved in neuronal plasticity forms virus-like capsids to help carry mRNA cargo between cells David Sherwood (Duke University) - Developmental Biology lab site Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Dave's work is incredible, spanning the disciplines of cell biology and developmental biology with interests in mechanobiology, cancer and stem cells. His lab has developed an in vivo system for studying cell invasion and for dissecting the mechanisms that regulate this process. David Tank (Princeton Neuroscience Institute) - Neural Circuit Dynamics lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness one of the pioneers in developing optogenetics, discovered many of the important principles in mice cognitive spatial navigation Susumu Tonegawa (MIT) - Neuroscience, Learning and Memory lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Kay Tye (Salk) - Systems Neuroscience lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness 1. Many high profile papers, great advocate for women and minorities, and full of great energy for young scientists to strive for 2. Because she is awesome, doing great research using multidisciplinary approaches to answer important questions in neuroscience Gerard (Gerry) Wright (McMaster University) - Antibiotic Resistance lab site Wikipedia Nominator's Explanation of Awesomeness Does field work to find new metagenomic biosynthetic clusters but also investigates molecular mechanisms of improving antibiotic efficacy by other secondary metabolites (scientific diversity!). He's the Director of Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University, and a leader in the antibiotic and Streptomyces fields. (also we don't have enough microbiology professors, speakers, or seminars at Rockefeller)